The Tenderloin

WORK IN PROGRESS (Also refer to blog posts for detailed information about individual buildings.)

Uptown Tenderloin Historic District

Map of the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District (National Register of Historic Places listing #08001407, 02 May 2009), with markers referenced to the numbered blocks, individual buildings, and historic sites depicted in this segment (work in progress).

A Brief Introduction

The architectural data in this section was first researched over twenty-five years ago by the late Anne Bloomfield, and more recently—in depth and with meticulous attention to detail—by Michael Corbett, with whom I worked in 2007-8 on a survey of the Tenderloin for the National Register of Historic Places district nomination. Historical details have been drawn from my own research and personal experience, as well as the painstaking research of friend and fellow historian Peter Field, who each spring and fall gives free historical walking tours of the Tenderloin, which I highly recommend to all.

Peter Field and Mark Ellinger, January 2011. At the Castro Theater on the opening night of “Noir City 9.” (Photo by Mike Humbert)

Prior to the establishment of the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District in 2009, the Tenderloin was never an officially adopted district but rather an informal and popular area designation, having no precise boundaries. A complex area linked to well-defined districts on every side, its eastern and northern boundaries in particular were impossible to pin down, and the common name for the area—Tenderloin—did not appeal to the real estate or hotel industries, or to middle class residents. Largely developed as a respectable residential area, it was home to socially ambitious people before the 1906 fire; afterward it was rebuilt for retail and office workers. Yet for over a century it has been best known as the Tenderloin, a center of both legal entertainment businesses including theaters, restaurants, bars and clubs, and illegal businesses for the accommodation of vice—prostitution, gambling, prohibition era drinking, and drugs.

“Tenderloin Chronicles – Ellis and Larkin” Snapped on one of countless photographic excursions through the Tenderloin, this shadow portrait of myself includes what was once Tessie Wall’s parlor house, seen here as a bright orange building in the upper right.

Early Development

In the years just prior to the California Gold Rush, the vicinity of what would later be known as the Tenderloin was an undeveloped area with low sand dunes rising along the southern flank of Nob Hill. When the United States began its conquest of California in 1846, Lieutenant Washington Allon Bartlett, USN was first appointed and then elected as the alcalde* of the trading hamlet of Yerba Buena. Believing that marrying the town’s name to that of the San Francisco Bay would give them a commercial advantage, its merchants and tradesmen prevailed upon Bartlett and on 30 January 1847 he issued a proclamation that officially changed the name of Yerba Buena to San Francisco.

*mayor

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

View of San Francisco, formerly Yerba Buena, in 1846-7, before the discovery of gold. The eastern slope of Nob Hill rises above Yerba Buena Cove and Montgomery Street on the waterfront in this early engraving, published after the village of Yerba Buena was officially renamed San Francisco. In the distance are “Los Pechos de la Choco”—otherwise known as Twin Peaks—and the solitary pinnacle of Lone Mountain.

The town’s growth prompted Bartlett’s successor as alcade, Edwin Bryant, to hire an Irishman named Jasper O’Farrell to survey the town and extend its limits. O’Farrell’s 1847 survey projected a grid of streets onto open land covering an area of some 800 acres bounded by the waterfront, Francisco, Post and Leavenworth Streets, thereby setting the stage for further development. Most of the future Uptown Tenderloin was included in William M. Eddy’s 1849 survey that extended O’Farrell’s projections west to Larkin, and the remainder of the district was within the 1858 extension of Eddy’s survey to Divisadero.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Official map of San Francisco, 12 August 1850. This plan for the City’s streets was drawn from William Eddy’s projections, a month before California was admitted to the Union.

Early development of the district took place in the low area between Turk and Ellis Streets that stretches east from Jones Street to around Fourth and Market, then known as St. Ann’s Valley. In 1853 there were fewer than twenty buildings in the entire area. Six years later roughly a quarter of the lots in St. Ann’s Valley and along adjacent streets had buildings on them. By 1865 every street in the district was lined with nearly continuous rows of wood buildings, mostly row houses and flats and some single family houses set back from the street, and the inhabitants were mainly the socially ambitious—the bourgeoisie or middle class.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Map of San Francisco, 1853. Developed blocks are shaded; outlined in red is the approximate extent of St. Ann’s Valley.

Source: Bancroft Library, Jesse B. Cooke Collection

St. Ann’s Valley, 1865. In this view looking north across a freshly graded Market Street, the declivity of St. Ann’s Valley is readily apparent. Visible on the right is the foot of Mason Street.

The Tivoli Opera House

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Tivoli Opera House, circa 1878.

In 1877 Joseph Kreling was a young man who thought that San Francisco needed music. Determined to fill that need, he a gave concerts in a former mansion near the foot of Eddy Street by performers that included a ladies’ orchestra from Vienna. When the craze for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore swept across America, Alice Oates and company performed it in San Francisco, and soon afterward other comic opera companies appeared on the horizon. Kreling hired various members of these companies and with them founded his own opera company in 1879. A short block from the Tivoli was the newly-opened Baldwin Hotel, full of travelers and businessmen in need of entertainment, and partly through them the Tivoli’s popularity and renown soon became far-flung. For nearly thirty years, except in observance of Kreling’s death, the Tivoli Opera House never closed its doors.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Tivoli Café, 1905. The Tivoli Café was on Eddy Street near the corner of Anna Lane (now Cyril Magnin Way). The building partly visible on the left was the Tivoli Opera House until the end of 1903, when the company moved into its new opera house, the refashioned Panorama Buiilding at Eddy and Mason.

Postcard, 1903.

When director W.H. Leahy took charge of the house in 1890, he began producing Italian opera four months of the year with companies he recruited from small opera houses in Italy. In 1903 he built a new Tivoli Opera House around the old Panorama Building on the southwest corner of Mason and Eddy, where now stands the Ambassador Hotel. While traveling in Mexico late the same year, Leahy heard soprano Luisa Tetrazzini singing with an itinerant Italian opera company in Mexico City. Leahy engaged the entire company and in 1904 they opened the new opera house in Rigoletto. Singing the part of Gilda despite a cold, Mme.Tetrazzini became an immediate sensation. For the next two years her many performances at the Tivoli packed the house to overflowing and Luisa Tetrazzini became a star of international repute.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Market and Mason, 1905. To the right, behind sculptor Douglas Tilden’s Native Sons Monument, are the tower and east facade of the Tivoli Opera House at the corner of Mason and Eddy (note the sign advertising “Miss Timidity”). Across Eddy Street from the opera house is the mansard-roofed Golden State Hotel above Spider Kelly’s saloon, and behind it is the Techau Tavern. That the Native Sons Monument was originally located in the Tenderloin is piquantly ironic when viewed in the light of a popular ditty that ran thus:

The miners came in forty-nine
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they got together
They produced the native son.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Ruins of the Tivoli Opera House, 1906. Two years after it opened, the new opera house was destroyed by the Great Earthquake and Fire.

Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

San Francisco Call, 13 March 1913. W.H. Leahy brought back Luisa Tetrazzini (pictured near the center of the photo spread) to reprise her role as Gilda when he opened a brand-new Tivoli at 70 Eddy Street, near the site of the first Tivoli Opera House.

Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection

San Francisco Call, 13 March 1913. The new Tivoli’s opening night performance was attended by the creme de la creme of San Francisco society.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Tivoli Opera House, 1949. Following construction of the War Memorial Opera House as part of the new post-fire Civic Center, and as popular entertainment changed from musicals and vaudeville to motion pictures, the Tivoli’s popularity faded and attempts to revive the splendor of the old opera house failed. The Tivoli had its final season in 1949, and in 1951 the building was demolished and replaced by a parking garage.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Tivoli Opera House, 1951. Stripped of equipment and furnishings, its walls already broken by demolition crews, the opera house awaited the wrecking ball when the entrance and marquee were captured in this wistful farewell portrait.

Birth of the Tenderloin

After a Comstock silver lode bonanza made him a multimillionaire, in 1878 Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin opened a luxury hotel and theater bearing his name on the northeast corner of Powell and Market. In the area nearby were restaurants and saloons where gambling took place, and around 1885 dance halls and parlor houses began to appear in the district. Where the money flows, there also vice goes; and thus from around 1880 through the 1890s, the area roughly encompassed by Market Street, Union Square, City Hall, and Van Ness Avenue—distinctly uptown from the Barbary Coast near the waterfront—developed as a center of entertainment and vice that was subsequently characterized as “tenderloin,” a term that originated in New York.

Source: Bancroft Library, Jesse B. Cook Collection

Baldwin Hotel, 1879. Here photographed a year after it opened, the Baldwin was a luxury hotel, the equivalent in its time of the present-day Hilton Hotel complex between Ellis and O’Farrell Streets.

In a history by Herbert Asbury, the coining of “tenderloin” is ascribed to the New York Police Department’s Captain Alexander Williams, who in 1879 was reportedly transferred to the 29th Precinct that had jurisdiction over an area called Satan’s Circus. When asked by a friend why he seemed so pleased about his transfer, Williams alluded to extortion payments made to police by the area’s shady and illicit businesses, saying,

I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.

While the story of its origin is anecdotal, the euphemism was well-chosen and from New York the term’s usage spread across the country to San Francisco; both Chicago and Los Angeles, for example, had their own Tenderloins.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

St. Ann’s Building, 1879. The St. Ann’s Building was on the northwest corner of Eddy, across Powell Street from the Baldwin Hotel. On the ground floor were a billiards parlor, a bank, and a barbershop. An entrance on Eddy Street led downstairs to the Louvre Bar and Restaurant in the basement. When the St. Ann’s Building was destroyed in the 1906 fire, it was replaced by a reincarnation of the Techau Tavern. Near the end of World War I that building was demolished to make way for a branch of A.P. Giannini’s Bank of Italy, designed by Bliss and Faville and completed in 1920.

Map courtesy of Nancy Pratt Melton

Bird’s Eye View Map (detail), 1896. Outlined in red is the area that was characterized as “tenderloin.”

The earliest application of “tenderloin” to San Francisco is not precisely known, but the Tenderloin is described by that name in the 1890s by various historians including Herbert Asbury, who calls the district the Uptown Tenderloin in his book about the Barbary Coast. Lawrence Wonderling penetrates the heart of the district’s mystique when he writes

The Tenderloin was etched into the San Francisco infrastructure long before San Francisco recognized the word. […] For over 100 years the Tenderloin has waxed and waned within . . . (its) outer perimeters. […] It has been structurally destroyed, publicly intimidated, blasphemed and socially quarantined, all of which may have served to alter, but never eliminate, the Tenderloin.

Near the end of the nineteenth century the physical fabric of the area began to change, such that by 1905 there were a few brick buildings and a multi-story hotel or two in almost every block.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Baldwin Hotel Fire, 1898. E.J. Baldwin’s luck turned against him when his hotel was destroyed by a fire on 23 November 1898, and newspapers shortly thereafter began referring to him as “the former millionaire.”

Postcard, Flood Building, 1904. The Flood Building was built on the site of the Baldwin Hotel by the heirs of James C. Flood, whose Consolidated Virginia Mine yielded the largest mineral strike in US history.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Ellis and Taylor, 1905. Small storefronts line the north side of Ellis Street between Taylor and Mason, the block where today stands the Hilton Hotel complex. Partly visible in the background is the Mason Street YMCA.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Ellis and Powell, circa 1905. The view is to the east from Powell Street. The Flood Building is the nearest building on the right, and about mid-block on the left is boxer Jim Corbett’s saloon.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

O’Farrell and Jones, circa 1905. Pictured here is the northeast corner of the intersection, where today stands the Pacific Bay Inn.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

O’Farrell Street before the fire, 1906. The view is to the east below Leavenworth. To the left are flats above storefronts; on the right is a rooming house next to Victorian row houses with gated fences around small front yards. In the distance is the domed Call Building on Market Street.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

O’Farrell Street east of Van Ness Avenue, 1906.

Cataclysm

The 1906 earthquake and fire completely devastated the neighborhood, leaving only a few brick walls and the shell of St. Boniface Church within the future boundaries of the historic district.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

The day everything changed, 18 April 1906. Photographs of the old district are rare and none more eloquently capture the flavor of Old San Francisco than this view of the area once known as St. Ann’s Valley. Wood frame buildings line the north side of Eddy Street; the large building in the left foreground is the Alhambra Theater on the northeast corner of Eddy and Jones, now Boeddeker Park. The Flood Building at Powell and Market is the uppermost building on the right. By the end of the following day the entire district would be devoured by the conflagration, seen here in the background as a towering wall of smoke.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Eddy below Leavenworth, 18 April 1906. On the left is a Baptist church with a false front in Greek Revival style; at the bottom of Eddy Street is the old Market Street Emporium.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Mason Street, 6:25am, 18 April 1906. Smoke from the South of Market fire fills the sky in this dramatic photo, shot from just below Eddy Street fifteen minutes after the ‘quake.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Turk and Taylor, 18 April 1906. “. . . wood buildings, mostly row houses and flats […] (with) a few brick buildings and a multi-story hotel or two in almost every block.”

Aftermath

In the aftermath of the disaster a new building law was enacted that played a major role in the rebuilding of the Uptown Tenderloin. Until 5 July 1906, when the new building law took effect, new construction was prohibited. Most importantly, the entire district was covered by the newly established “fire limits” requiring fire resistant building materials and methods. All construction had to have brick or reinforced concrete exterior walls; the large number of wood buildings that were in the area before the fire could not be rebuilt as they were.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

The smitten city, 1906. Looking northwest from Mason Street near Eddy, this remarkably detailed post-fire panorama includes much of what is now the Uptown Tenderloin. Until 1906 it was largely a neighborhood of wood buildings interspersed with structures built of unreinforced masonry. Consequently the district’s destruction by fire was particularly complete, as most buildings were entirely reduced to ashes.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Powell and Market, 1906. A few shards were all that remained of the St. Ann’s Building on the corner of Powell and Eddy. The burned-out shell of the Flood Building is on the right.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Jones and Turk, 1906. A twelve story “fire proof” building was reduced to a pile of broken masonry and twisted steel. Partly visible on the left is Hale Brothers on Market Street.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

O’Farrell and Leavenworth, 1906. Many buildings were virtually gone without a trace.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Ruins of the Tivoli Opera House, 1906. The Tivoli Opera House has been mistakenly named by some as the predecessor of the War Memorial Opera House, when in fact that honor belongs to the San Francisco Opera House on Mission Street, also destroyed in the fire; where Enrico Caruso gave what would be his last performance in San Francisco on the night before the ‘quake.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Market and Mason, 1906. Visible to the left of the Native Sons Monument are the ruins of the Poodle Dog Restaurant.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Ruins of the Poodle Dog Restaurant at Eddy and Mason, 1906. The original Poodle Dog was one of the City’s best-known restaurants, where everyone who was anyone in San Francisco could be seen from time to time. Above the public restaurant were private dining rooms, and on the floors above that were private rooms that were used for assignations and other, less mentionable affairs. In 1910 a new Poodle Dog opened at 125 Mason, the site of the Techau Tavern before the fire. The new Poodle Dog had an unmarked driveway to a garage in the rear, from which patrons could take an elevator directly to the private rooms above the restaurant.

The arrangement of private rooms above a downstairs restaurant was characteristic of San Francisco’s French restaurants, especially those in the Uptown Tenderloin. A surviving building of this type is at 851 O’Farrell, first opened in 1908 as Blanco’s Hotel and Restaurant. Next door at 859 O’Farrell was Blanco’s Cafe (now the Great American Music Hall), opened in 1906 by “Blind Boss” Chris Buckley, a saloonkeeper and neighborhood political organizer who became “boss” of San Francisco’s Democratic Party in the 1880s. Until he was deposed by a grand jury in 1898, Buckley made sure the Southern Pacific Railroad got what it wanted and ran the City the way he wanted by controlling a corrupt municipal government in the interest of graft.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

O’Farrell and Jones, 1906. “Herman S. Hoyt sits on the remains of the two story cottage that was his residence at 512 Jones Street.” A year later, the Hotel Proctor (Pacific Bay Inn) was built on this site.

The requirement for fire resistant buildings substantially increased construction costs, creating economic pressure to build larger buildings that generated more income from rents. Uptown Tenderloin property owners rebuilt on a much larger scale than what had existed before the earthquake. As a result, insurance payments provided only a fraction of the cost of new construction, and thus the Uptown Tenderloin was slower to be rebuilt than most other parts of the City.

Reconstruction – The First Wave

The district’s reconstruction was marked by successive waves of activity, and the first wave arrived as soon as the rubble left by the fire had been cleared. Some of the first buildings to go up were constructed with brick bearing walls, which require deep-set windows and segmental relieving arches—what I like to call “SRO windows.” In addition to the load of floors, roof, furniture and people, bearing walls must also support their own ponderous weight; the arched lintels keep the window openings from caving in by laterally distributing the weight of the wall above them.

Designed by the architect of the Hibernia Bank Building at 1 Jones Street, the Hotel Cecil (William Penn) is one of a few hotels in the district with storefronts that have remained largely intact (note the transom windows, ironwork, and recessed doorways). Next to it, looking eastward, are the Empress, Crystal and Bijou hotels, with the Parc Wyndham Hotel looming in the background.

The first new post-fire buildings in the district were mostly concentrated in the area closest to Market Street. Notable exceptions were the Winton Hotel at 445 O’Farrell, the Arlington Hotel at 480 Ellis, the Hotel Proctor (Pacific Bay Inn) at 520 Jones, and several buildings around the intersection of Eddy and Leavenworth, including the Hamlin, Allen, and Cadillac Hotels. Opened in 1906, the Hamlin was the very first hotel to be completed after the fire, followed the same year by the Allen Hotel and the Cadillac in early 1907.

Source: California State Library

Hotel Hamlin, 1906. Next to the already-opened Hamlin is the Lando Building, later converted to a rooming house named the Lando Hotel. Across Leavenworth Street is the nearly-finished Allen Hotel.

A spacious lobby with a red marble fireplace, a mezzanine-level gallery, and grand stairways to a former dining room together indicate that the Cadillac was designed to attract tourists as well as permanent residents. (For a detailed history of the Cadillac Hotel, see “Cadillac”.)

Here photographed in mid-construction and completed in early summer 2008, the Salvation Army’s Ray and Joan Kroc Community Center was built with funds that were part of a $1.5 billion bequest made in 2003 by hamburger heiress Joan Kroc. It replaces the Army’s old community center, which many years ago had been the Hotel Von Dorn, one of the buildings erected during the first wave of the district’s reconstruction. In its heyday the Von Dorn was clearly a very charming and cozy hotel.

The Parlor Houses of Jessie Hayman

Born 1867 in New Orleans, Annie May Wyant showed up in San Francisco sometime in the early 1890s. By 1895, using Jessie Mellon as her house name, she was boarding in Mrs. Nina Hayman’s “lodging house” at 225 Ellis Street, an address that would later become one of the best known in the annals of San Francisco prostitution. Opened in the late 1870s by Dolly Adams — former “Water Queen” of the Bella Union Theater — the Ellis Street establishment was taken over by Mrs. Hayman following Dolly’s retirement from madamship in the 1880s. Near the end of 1898, Nina Hayman retired to marry a wealthy San Francisco lumber dealer. As the house favorite, young Jessie took up her mentor’s name and business, and it was as Jessie Hayman or “Diamond Jessie” that she became famous.

Jessie’s full story has been told with great warmth and wit by Curt Gentry in his book The Madams of San Francisco.¹ Suffice for me to say that she was strict yet fair and often generous with her girls, and her parlor houses were the most lavish and fashionable in the district. She was tall and elegant, a shapely redhead and a lover of diamonds whose charms (and prices) were legendary in her own time, as illustrated by the following anecdote.

In the late 1890s, photographer Arnold Genthe introduced Jessie to a Grand Duke of the Imperial Russian Empire, who wanted to take her back to Russia with him. When Jessie politely declined, the Grand Duke commissioned Genthe to make a life-size enlargement of her portrait. At a Newport luncheon honoring the Grand Duke the day before he returned to Russia, His Royal Highness proposed a toast.

To the most beautiful woman I have met in your country. She shall be nameless. Even if she were not many miles away, she would not have been included in this gathering. I ask you all to drink her health.

Thus it was that ladies of unquestioned virtue, the cream of American society, raised their glasses and drank to a demimondaine, for a request from a Grand Duke was a command.

The ultimate fate of the portrait is unknown. Perhaps it was destroyed by Bolshevik Red Guards during the 1917 October Revolution; or maybe, along with other detritus of the fallen empire, it was hidden in a cellar only to be forgotten and left to molder in the darkness. No matter what actually happened, the only known photograph of Diamond Jessie is now lost.

Several months after the the 225 Ellis establishment was destroyed by the 1906 fire, Jessie moved with her girls into the top two floors of the newly-constructed Dunphy Building. There they stayed until the fall of 1907, when she acquired a new lodging house at 44 Mason and furnished it as a deluxe bagnio.

From 1907 till 1912, when she moved her girls and furnishings to Eddy Street, the Glenwood was Jessie’s parlor house. Much later it would become Polo’s Stadium Club, for many years one of San Francisco’s most popular meeting spots for fine food and drink.

From 1912 until her retirement in 1917, 130 Eddy was the last of Diamond Jessie’s brothels. The first floor was leased out as a saloon, the parlors and madam’s suite were on the second floor, and the girls’ suites, dining room and kitchen were on the upper floors. With the help of Jessie’s backing, one of her girls later became a leading Hollywood madam under the name Beverly Davis. In her autobiography Call House Madam,² Ms. Davis devotes several chapters to her mentor that include a description of the Eddy Street brothel.

Jessie’s prices were staggering. She had a champagne cellar with wines from all parts of the world. Whoever furnished the house knew his Place Pigalle stuff. There was the red room, the gold room, the Turkish room, the French room, the blue room. oriental couches and shaded lamps, plush parlors one after the other with deep carpets on the floor. The bedrooms upstairs were done in the best style. It reflected ‘tone’ for a parlor house all the way through.

When she died in 1923, Jessie’s net worth in diamonds and Tenderloin real estate was one hundred thousand dollars, the equivalent in 2009 dollars of well over one point two million.

“Joy of Life” (2003)

Crystal Hotel, 128-132 Eddy Street.

One of my germinal photographs, the Crystal Hotel viewed from Mason Street is also one of my favorites. It captures the essence of the Tenderloin as a many-layered source of fascination. I was captivated by these walls long before I had a camera to photograph them. The faded advertisements afforded a glimpse of the past, but the peculiar, limpet-like annex was a real enigma. Could it have been a meat locker for the brothel’s kitchen? No one seemed to know. Near the end of 2005, an acquaintance told me of a former tenant who had used the tiny space as an extra bedroom by cramming a folding camp bed into it. Alas, this anecdote is all I have gleaned. The little annex and lovely ghost signs are now largely hidden, eclipsed by a housing development, thus bringing to a close this page in Tenderloin history.

A second wave of construction occurred between 1910 and 1913, when housing was constructed for the builders and later the visitors of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. By 1913, when much of San Francisco was largely rebuilt, many lots in the Uptown Tenderloin remained vacant. Several blocks were more than half empty, and buildings in the district were mostly three- to five-story hotels, many of which housed workers who rebuilt the city. There were also saloons, a new Tivoli Opera House, the Hamman Baths, and “motion picture supplies” (film exchanges) on the ground floors of hotel buildings. Interspersed throughout were more than a few illicit businesses, some of them quite famous in their time, such as the parlor houses of rival Tenderloin madams Tessie Wall and Jessie Hayman, and elegantly infamous French restaurants like Blanco’s on O’Farrell Street and the reincarnated Poodle Dog at 125 Mason, which had elevators to soundproof private rooms where patrons were discreetly served by button-lipped waiters.

Now that it has been restored, the Herald is one of the loveliest buildings in the Tenderloin, appearing much the same as it did a century ago. The large corner storefront was originally a drug store. Ten years after he designed the Herald, architect Alfred Henry Jacobs designed the now-demolished Granada Theater on Market Street (see also “Paramount Theater” in Part II: Mid-Market).

If you look up from Jones Street at the back of what is now the Coast Hotel, you’ll find this lovely fading relic of a time gone by. Shawmut is the original Native American name for the neck of land on which the city of Boston, Massachusetts was founded. Anglicized, the word has also come to mean spring. The Shawmut was so named because many of its rooms have private baths, something of a luxury at the time the hotel was built.

The Diamond Hotel was built on the site of the Haymarket Dance Hall run by Jerome Bassity, the “uncrowned king of the Tenderloin” and one of the more unsavory characters in Tenderloin history. Bassity would lure girls to a place that he co-owned in Sacramento, where they were broken into prostitution and then returned to San Francisco to be “turned out” in a parlor house run by his girlfriend Stella Hayes. When the Diamond Hotel opened, Bassity ran a gambling den in the basement that he slyly named the Thirty-third Assembly District Club. The San Francisco Chronicle was fond of pointing out that whenever the San Francisco Police Department raided neighborhood gambling establishments, they always managed to overlook Bassity’s “club.”

The building to the right of the Diamond Hotel is the Hamman Baths, one of two neighborhood bathhouses with plunges that were filled with saltwater from Ocean Beach, catering to residents of lodgings where water was a once-a-week provision. In the early twentieth century a public bathhouse may have also been cheaper than the extra cost of a bath in a hotel. John Galen Howard, architect of the University of California campus and one of California’s most respected architects, died at the Hamman Baths in 1931. The Lurline Baths, rebuilt in 1915 and demolished in 1936, were at Bush and Larkin.

Beginning with the motion-sequence experiments of Eadweard Muybridge and his invention of the zoöpraxiscope* in 1879, San Francisco has been a center of independent film making, distinguished by innovation in all areas of the film industry. In the early years of the cinema, movie theaters had to buy the films they showed from the studios. A couple of San Franciscans named the Miles Brothers revolutionized film distribution in 1902 by purchasing films from the studios and renting them to theaters, thereby establishing the first centralized film exchange, the equivalent of a lending library for movie theaters.

Many early film exchanges were located in Tenderloin buildings because of their proximity to Market Street cinemas; however, nitrate film† was explosively volatile, so ordinary buildings were dangerous places in which to store movies, especially large quantities of them. Although delayed by political inertia (the ’06 conflagration notwithstanding), by 1911 was born the first of the Tenderloin’s many film exchange buildings: fireproof, reinforced concrete structures specifically designed for storing film.

*Muybridge’s zoöpraxiscope was one of the primary inspirations for Edison and Dickson’s Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system.

†Nitrocellulose was used as a flexible base for motion picture film until 1951, when it was replaced by acetate-based safety film.

To be continued . . .

The following text and photos are unedited material:

Essex

Though unique amid the surrounding architecture, the Art Nouveau-inspired facade of the Essex was nevertheless crafted to blend in by its designer, James Francis Dunn. The hotel’s neon blade sign is especially fine. Now owned by the Community Housing Partnership, the Essex began undergoing renovation late in 2006.

By the end of April 2008, its renovation was complete. The paint job is unfortunately garish and unbecoming, but the new marquee and restored blade sign are spectacular, although it seems the latter may still have some electrical problems. Even so, the corner of Ellis and Larkin is utterly transformed after dark by the torrid glow of neon.

The apartment building first emerged around 1900 and, over the next thirty-five years, gradually gained ascendancy over the hotel to satisfy the need for multiple-unit, “close-in” housing. Paul Groth has identified the essential difference between apartment and hotel as the individual kitchen, versus the central meal service provided by the hotel or from outside the building altogether. Constructed exactly in the period of competition between the two forms of multiple-unit housing, the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District contains buildings of both forms, as well as hybrid apartment-hotels which had more privacy than hotels and provided more services than apartments.

Brown Jug

Formerly an Owl (later Rexall) drugstore, the Brown Jug has been in continuous operation since 1941. Owned by Max McIntyre and affably managed by bartenders Charles, Vince, Jo, and Mark, it is one of the neighborhood’s “old school” survivors and a favorite of many long-time Tenderloin residents.

Ghost Light

One of the City’s first Master Lease hotels, the Jefferson has been managed since 1999 by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. Especially at night, the hotel looks like the setting for an old Alfred Hitchcock film or one of Dashiell Hammett’s stories such as The Maltese Falcon, which takes place in the Tenderloin.

Down Eddy Street

These next two shots are among my earliest photos. Although the marquee and nearly all of the blade signs have had their neon fixtures removed, what you see here is pretty much the way most sidewalks in the lower Tenderloin appeared as recently as thirty or forty years ago.

I love the patchwork quilt of overlapping signs and fire escapes that recede into the distance.

Between 1988 and 2002, the year the San Francisco Sprinkler Ordinance was passed, hotel fires had claimed over 1,700 SRO units and several lives. Thousands of tenants lost their property to fire and were displaced for months and even years afterward. When a fire burned out several rooms at the Kinney in 1999, the hotel was shut down and boarded up for seven years, removing fifty-seven units from the housing market. The hotel was finally reopened in midsummer 2006.

Born in Germany and educated at Stuttgart, Julius E. Krafft immigrated to America in 1872, spent a couple of years in Chicago, and moved to San Francisco in 1874. For twelve years he ran the drafting department for T.J. Welsh (Welsh and Carey*), after which he opened his own business. Among the buildings designed by Krafft are the Hotel Verona, Allen Hotel, and St. George Apartments in the Tenderloin, St. Paulus Lutheran Church at 999 Eddy, a Lutheran church in Alameda, and numerous private residences. G. Albert Lansburgh, who later designed the Golden Gate Theatre and many other famous structures, worked for Krafft while studying at UC Berkeley.

*Buildings in the Tenderloin designed by Welsh and Carey are the Rocklin (Western) Hotel, Hotel Proctor (Pacific Bay Inn), and an apartment building at 965 Geary.

The area that forms the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District was entirely constructed in the years between the earthquake and fire of 1906 and the Great Depression. Social, economic and legal forces together made the most marketable structure a three- to seven-story, multi-unit residential apartment, hotel, or apartment-hotel constructed of brick or reinforced concrete.

A limited number of architects, builders and clients produced a visually consistent, classically oriented group of buildings that conform to the same vocabulary of ornament and utilize the same decorative materials: brick or stucco facings enhanced with molded galvanized iron, terra-cotta, or cast concrete.

Battambang

Besides the apartment windows, the most compelling features of this building are its signs, both new and old. The Khmer script of the Battambang Market marquee and the antique, shield-shaped metal armature are an interesting juxtaposition of cultures and times. One of the earliest writing systems used in Southeast Asia, Khmer script has evolved over a thousand years and is descended from the ancient Brahmi script of India.

Boeddeker Park

Boeddeker Park is a tiny inner city park in the middle of the Tenderloin. Since its opening and dedication over twenty years ago to the late Father Boeddeker, the Franciscan who established the St. Anthony Foundation, the park has been plagued with crime. The City’s shortsighted, heavy-handed, entirely ineffective solution was to erect a tall, stout fence of steel around the perimeter of the park and down the length of the brick-paved footpath that bisects it, afterward removing all the lovely cast-iron park benches along the footpath, resulting in a landscape that is uninviting and devoid of comfort. One of the nicest remaining fixtures is the clock that stands at the park’s entrance, thankfully outside the fence.

All three of these hotels have been rehabilitated and converted to supportive housing. Most recent was the Alexander Residence, by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, which has its offices across the street in the Franciscan Towers.

Below are some postcards of the Alexander in its glory days, when it was the Olympic Hotel.

Alcatraz Island is strangely missing and the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge ends before landfall in this heavily retouched picture of San Francisco Bay, circa 1939.

Connie’s Restaurant, 1941.Newscopy: “Two doors at Connie’s bid you welcome. One leads to the waffle shop . . . the other to the cocktail buffet. Jim Weir manages both institutions, which really are one. Connie’s is a favorite dining and drinking rendezvous . . . the address, 225 Eddy Street.”

111 Taylor Street, 1982. After Compton’s Cafeteria closed, the ground floor was occupied for many years by Frenchy’s K and T, an adult bookstore.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Taylor Street, 1926. The photographer must have climbed a lamp post to shoot this dramatic perspective, looking north on Taylor from near Market Street. On the left is the Grand Hotel; nearest on the right are the Porter and Warfield Hotels. In the late 1970s. after the Porter Hotel and an adjoining row of storefronts and one-arm eateries on Turk Street were torn down, the foundations were filled in and paved over to make a parking lot.

Postcard, Grand Hotel, circa 1907.

Original Joe’s

Original Joe’s Italian Restaurant. 144 Taylor Street.

On 12 October 2007, a $2 million fire burned out this 70 year-old Tenderloin landmark. Although a sign on the front door says, “Closed due to fire, opening soon”, rumor has it that the owner, Marie Duggan, daughter of the original Joe, has been having problems with the insurance company. The restaurant is missed by all in the neighborhood and by many people around the world.

Original Joe’s Italian Restaurant. 144 Taylor Street.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Lower Eddy Street, 1942. This photo was apparently taken from the second floor of the Rosenbaum Building (better known in more recent years as Polly Esther’s or Club 181), across Eddy Street from the Hotel Kern (now the William Penn). The nearest buildings on the left are the Empress, Crystal, and Wade (now the Bijou) hotels. Before the Hallidie Plaza BART station was constructed in the 1970s, Eddy Street actually began at Market and Powell. The building in the upper right corner is the old Emporium on Market Street.

Crystal Sandwich Shop, 110 Eddy Street, 1931. Located in a storefront of the Hotel Wade (now the Bijou) the Crystal Sandwich Shop was a Prohibition era speakeasy run by bootleggers Harold McGuire and Dutch White. It was renamed the 110 Club in the late ’30s, when it was acquired by Tenderloin gambler “Bones” Remmer.

Chez Paree, 150 Mason Street, 1964. When the row of buildings above the Olympic Hotel was razed, the Chez Paree and its famous sign moved across the street to 139 Mason, into what had been the All Star Strip Club.

All Star Strip Club, 139 Mason Street, 1964. All of the buildings between 115 and 167 Mason have been razed and replaced by Glide Community Housing at 125 and 149 Mason Street.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Mason Street, 1906. At the photo’s center is the burned-out shell of the Fairmont Hotel on top of Nob Hill. Center right are the six story ruins of the Poodle Dog at the northeast corner of Mason and Eddy.

“Mason and Turk” 2007 Survey

Shot from the same perspective as the previous photograph, this is how Mason Street appears today. The sign for the short-lived Crash Club marks the site of Polo’s Restaurant.

When the Tenderloin was extolled for its jazz clubs and night life, the Musicians Union Hall was its wellspring of entertainers. Located just across Jones Street from the union hall, the Padre Hotel was then known as a musicians’ hotel.

Unit block Golden Gate Avenue, 1926. For many years the upper floor of the Golden Gate Avenue Garage (far left) was a chauffeur’s club. On the right are the rear entrance and marquee of the now-demolished Granada Theater (see also “Paramount Theater” in Part II: Mid-Market).

Saint Boniface

St. Boniface Church. 133 Golden Gate Avenue. Architects: Brothers Adrian Weaver and Idelphonse Lethert. 1902, rebuilt 1906. Originally served the German population of San Francisco.

The home of San Francisco’s Order of Franciscan Monks, Saint Boniface Church is next door to the order’s Saint Anthony Foundation and dining room. Established in 1950 to feed the poor by Franciscan Friar Alfred Boeddeker, the Saint Anthony Foundation provides clothing, shelter, and medical and social services for the poor and homeless, and its dining room feeds over 2,500 people every day.

Pulpit and lectern, St. Boniface Church.

Upon entering the new millennium, St. Boniface underwent a three-year, $12 million seismic retrofit and renovation of the church, tower and friary, and constructed a new middle school in the renovated shell of the former administration building. The sumptuous restorations of the church’s historic finishes and fixtures are breathtaking. Unfortunately, because I didn’t have proper equipment when I shot it, this photo falls far short of showing how beautiful they really are.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

St. Boniface, 1906. The original church was tipped with spires, as seen to the left in this photo. In front of City Hall on the right is the domed Hall of Records. Smoke in the background is from the Market Street and Hayes Valley fires.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

St. Boniface after the fire, 1906.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Lower Golden Gate Avenue, 1944. The nearest building on the right is the friary of the Franciscan Fathers; the building to its left was until 1949 a film exchange.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Knights of Columbus, 1941. The beautiful Knights of Columbus building at 150 Golden Gate was demolished in 2007 by its owner, St. Boniface Church.

Balboa

The Balboa Hotel is an unobtrusive building on Hyde Street, near Golden Gate Avenue. The ground floor is taken up by a variety of small businesses: a restaurant, a laundry and a tiny convenience store. The hotel’s facade would be entirely unremarkable if it weren’t for the beautiful stained glass marquee over its entrance.

Oasis

In 2003, a fire that broke out in one of the Oasis’s rooms was extinguished by the automatic room sprinkler before the Fire Department arrived. A long struggle by housing activists to have sprinklers installed in all the rooms of every residential hotel in San Francisco was still underway, making this a newsworthy event. I happened to be walking by the Oasis just as the fire engines arrived, so I was able to watch this little drama unfold. I took pictures and interviewed the battalion chief, and afterward wrote a brief article that I submitted along with the photos to the neighborhood paper. This was the photo the editor chose to accompany the article.

Postcard, circa 1928.

And here is the photo that stumped my friend who for many years had lived across the street from the Oasis without actually seeing the building (refer to my home page).

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Turk below Hyde, 1906. At the photo’s center are the ruins of St. Boniface on Golden Gate Avenue.

The reconstructed district’s hotels and apartments appealed to those who wanted or needed to live within walking distance of downtown: people who couldn’t afford or didn’t want to set up independent households, young professionals and young couples not settling in a single city or house, clerical and service employees whose incomes didn’t stretch far enough to permit full apartments or suburban flats, and seasonal workers.

The first building purchased by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (in 1981), the Aarti became a joint project between TNDC and Conard House, a non profit provider of assistance to people with mental health issues. Between the Aarti and the Senator runs a gated cul-de-sac named Cohen Alley that has been transformed into what is called the Tenderloin National Forest, a little oasis of greenery and community art.

Senator

The Senator lost its beautiful cornice and the double-hung sash of its graceful bow windows in 1991, when the building was converted from a hotel to apartments.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Hotel Senator, 1924.

The Senator’s restored blade sign is a masterpiece of sign-making art, although I wouldn’t want to live in any of the rooms that are near it.

Postcard, circa 1923.

When the Senator’s blade sign was restored, I anticipated the eventual restoration of the marquee. Several years passed after I took this photograph. The marquee was at last removed, but instead of being restored, it was replaced by a much smaller plywood copy, a poor imitation of the original.

Cornice (Reflected Light)

One morning, while on a rambling walk in search of subject matter, I let my feet make their own decisions without any conscious directive (I’ll sometimes do this when I’m in need of inspiration). Walking down Jones Street and reaching Ellis, my feet turned right and headed west. My eyes were pointed upward, as they often are, so the first thing I saw on rounding the corner was the sunlight reflected onto this beautiful cornice, revealing details that are normally lost in shadow.

Aldrich

And here is the same sign three years later, following its restoration. Blade signs are part of what makes the Tenderloin unique, and the preservation of these artifacts heightens a sense of place for residents and visitors alike.

Airporter bus terminal, 1982. After the airport bus terminal at Ellis and Mason was torn down in the late ’70s to make room for an expansion of the Hilton Hotel, a new terminal was built on the southwest corner of Ellis and Taylor, opposite Glide Memorial Methodist Church. The tall building behind the terminal is the Olympic Hotel (now the Alexander Residence) on Eddy Street.

Ellis and Taylor

Two doors up Taylor Street from Glide Memorial Church is the Hotel Mark Twain (formerly the Tilden Hotel), where, in 1949, Billie Holiday was arrested during a raid by federal narcotics agents, who claimed they found the singer in possession of opium and a pipe. She was later acquitted, after being defended in court by San Francisco attorney Jake Ehrlich, who had previously defended such famous figures as Sally Stanford and Gene Krupa.

Source: Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

YMCA, Ellis and Mason, 1906. Just three years after the Ellis Street Y was destroyed by the conflagration, its modern steel-frame replacement was completed at 220 Golden Gate Avenue (see also “YMCA” in Part Three: Uptown Tenderloin).

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Casino Theater, circa 1917. Built on the site of the Ellis Street YMCA, the Casino Theater occupied the northeast corner of Ellis and Mason, where now stands the Nikko Hotel. Featuring both vaudeville and motion pictures, the theater first opened on 08 April 1917. Renamed the Downtown Theater in 1942, it closed for the last time on 19 September 1952.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

Downtown Terminal, 1959. Built for the bus line that served the SF International Airport, the Downtown Terminal was on the northwest corner of Ellis and Mason. Buses entered on Ellis Street and exited in the rear on Latham Place.

Columbia

With its yellow-painted facade and mansard roof, and its bright green, five-story-tall Deco corner blade sign, the Columbia was definitely an eye-catcher. It stood out amid the surrounding architecture like a heretic in a crowd of conformists. In 2008, it returned to the fold when it was repainted in a palette of subdued earthen colors. I must admit I liked the Columbia far more when it was heterodox, and so in remembrance I offer this photo.

Source: San Francisco History Center, S.F. Public Library

O’Farrell and Taylor, 1955.Newscopy: “Photo shows the southeast corner of Taylor and O’Farrell Streets, chosen today as the site of a new downtown air line bus terminal. The terminal will occupy the area covered by the corner hotel, and probably will extend to take in the Bohemian Garage on O’Farrell Street, owned by Larry Barrett.” All of the buildings in this photograph are now gone, and the entire block has been taken over by the enormous Hilton Hotel complex.

Pacific Bay Inn

The Pacific Bay Inn often leaves its neon sign turned on during the day, which allowed me to capture it, appropiately, against a backdrop of summertime fog coming in from the bay.

Summer Fog

In 2004, I spent the Fourth of July with a couple of friends in their apartment on the seventh floor of the Pacific Bay Inn, which afforded me an excellent view of the lower Tenderloin. It was a typical San Francisco summer day, warm and sunny until around 4:00 in the afternoon, when the fog, lots of it, began to pour in from the ocean.

Admiral

Tall, pink, wide and sporting a cornice that looks positively aerodynamic, the Admiral Hotel is anything but subtle. The fan-shaped marquee over the entrance is rather special, too. At one time, the Admiral was fairly classy as residential hotels go, but its exterior belies how seedy the interior has become. Unfortunately, a presentable exterior that hides living conditions ranging from sub-standard to outright hellish is typical of many SROs these days, although this is slowly changing as non-profit housing companies take over more of these hotels.

Beginning at the bottom of Nob Hill’s southern slope, the Tenderloin’s streets follow its northward rise until the Tenderloin becomes Lower Nob Hill, which ultimately becomes the exclusive Nob Hill. As the streets climb upward, so also do property values, even within the Tenderloin, and thus apartments between O’Farrell and Geary command the highest rents in the district.

Nite Cap

Once in a while, I’ll pay a visit to the Nite Cap, one of the friendliest neighborhood bars in the Tenderloin. It’s small and cozy, with a pool table and a jukebox filled with an eclectic mix of rock, jazz, and R&B. With the exception of the pool table, the interior still looks and feels much the same as it did the first time I saw it, nearly forty years ago.

Briscoe

The Briscoe is across Geary Street from the Geary Arms and next to the Edinburgh Castle, a perennially popular watering hole, in what is locally known as the Tendernob, the area where the somewhat fuzzy social, cultural, and architectural boundaries of the Tenderloin and lower Nob Hill overlap.

Nazareth

The Nazareth Hotel sits at the edge of the Tenderloin on the corner of Geary and Jones. Its battered, weather-beaten sign is awkward and far from beautiful, but it was the sign that attracted me, not the hotel. After some searching I found the sign’s home, framed against the visual anarchy of a tangle of nearby fire escapes and pipes.

Magic Hour

This parting shot places the Tenderloin within a larger perspective. From the east entry steps to City Hall, the northeast view encompasses four districts. Some of the flags that line Civic Center Plaza flutter in the foreground. Behind the Civic Center steam plant stack, which looms over the northeast corner of McAllister and Larkin, is the McAllister Hotel; to its left are the Rainbow Apartments, and behind it, in the Tenderloin, is UC Hastings Law School. Also representing the Tenderloin are the red-brick Oasis Apartments facing the Turk Street Mosser Tower, and the monolithic Hilton SF Tower I, which dwarfs everything around it. The dome flying the American flag is part of the Hilton complex. Arguably the most famous building in the Union Square District, the St. Francis Hotel is seen here to the left and behind the Oasis. A Financial District landmark at 555 California Street, the red granite Bank of America building is twelve blocks distant as the crow flies.

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85 responses to “The Tenderloin”

Thank you for creating a wonderful tribute to this downtown area of San Francisco. I’m interested in knowing what year Latham Place on Mason disappeared. Looking away from Market, it was on the left side of the street about half way down the block between Ellis and O’Farrell. I believe the massive Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel takes up the entire block now.

Referring to my small collection of Sanborn Insurance maps, Latham Place was still there in the early ’50s. It disappeared with the construction of the Hilton Hotel, which has grown in stages since then, in ’63-’64. Hilton Hotel – 1964 (Source: San Francisco History Center, SF Public Library)

I lived in Oasis from 1996 to 1999 and this page brought back fond memories from that time in the TL. This is the most superb compilation of TL landmarks I have ever come across. Thank you so much. Despite all the sadness I had witnessed and partaken in, I loved everything about the TL because the place exemplified raw humanity. I will bookmark this page and return whenever I feel nostalgic.